Essays & Articles

New Zealand Evening (Central Otago)

At first blush, this painting from Ian Scott’s
Authentic Traditions appears to be textbook
postmodernism. Combine “low” art (beer
advertising) with “high” art (a photograph of
Colin McCahon, twentieth century New
Zealand art’s biggest gun) with a conventional
painting of iconic South Island scenery and a
cluster of punga trees for ironic effect.

Back in 1993, not only was the New Zealand
landscape tradition in art thought to be
exhausted, painting itself was thought to be
obsolete. Freighted with history, painting had
been superseded by video, performance and
installation as contemporary media. How better
to memorialize the end of painting in New
Zealand than with a nostalgic pot pourri of
kiwiana, an artistic mélange of redundant cultural
references from a time when beer was a dollar a
can?

Yet despite all the elements in Ian Scott’s
painting being representational and recognizably
symbolic, their dissonance emphasizes abstract,
formal properties in painting in a modernist way.
Colour blocks are pushed to the surface but there
is no logic to the distribution, no cohesion to the
pattern. Loud and important, a square of yellow
is balanced with one of green above, and a
floating rectangle of red hovers supernaturally
over a predominantly blue and green landscape.
Is the recently deceased modernist master, Colin
McCahon (1919-1987) an angel heralding new
beginnings for the landscape?

All the imagery is copied or appropriated.
Rather than invent his own version of the Great
New Zealand Landscape, the artist has repainted
a classic Douglas Badcock original of Central
Otago. Worthy of inclusion in a collection of table
mats of New Zealand scenery, this view is
carefully, and conventionally, composed. It gives
the viewer a bird’s eye perspective of a ploughed
field with a stone church and autumnal poplars
reflected in the glassy surface of the Clutha River
which flows diagonally across the foreground. A
dramatic sky casts shadows on the snowclad
peaks behind. Timelessness is the painter’s aim,
with the work a celebration of bucolic agricultural
life in the hinterland, or as South Islanders prefer
to call it, the heartland.

Commercially successful, Douglas Badcock
(1922-2009) once sold 42 paintings in an
afternoon at Smith & Caughey’s, and published
three books on his art in the 1970s. Badcock
frequently aced the Kelliher Art Award, an art
competition which ran annually in New Zealand
from 1956 to 1977 with a prize of £500.
Established by the beer baron Sir Henry Kelliher
(Dominion Breweries was his company, as heralded
by the beer advertisement silkscreened on this
work), its aim was “to encourage artists to paint
the essential character of the New Zealand scene
and the ways of life of its people”. With missionary
zeal and considerable capital, Kelliher, who was
from Otago himself, had hoped to stem the tide of
modernism and abstraction in the 1950s. As a
twenty year old immigrant from Bradford in
Yorkshire, Ian Scott had entered the competition,
winning the junior section with Low Tide, Anawhata
in 1965 while in his second year at art school.
Colin McCahon, who was Ian Scott’s lecturer at the
Elam School of Fine Arts in the mid 1960s, had
nothing but contempt for the Kelliher with its
“aesthetics of the cake tin or tea towel” and called
it the Kelliher prize for calendar art.

Rather than a postmodern critique of authorship
with a random collection of copies arranged
non-hierarchically, Ian Scott’s New Zealand Evening
is a serious consideration of the twilight of a
tradition. He emulates the way American painter
Robert Rauschenberg encouraged his viewers to
tease out the links between seemingly unrelated
imagery. He asks us to consider not only the status
of this mode of landscape in the contemporary art
world, but also the relationship between
abstraction and representation in modernism. This
continued as the theme for his work with recourse
to combining imagery from pornography and
minimalism until his recent death from cancer on
27 June 2013.